


Contingency

by Rhyo



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-12
Updated: 2012-05-12
Packaged: 2017-11-05 05:45:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/403068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhyo/pseuds/Rhyo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"For a covert ops agent, the word "hero" was a new thing and a damned fine one. He could get used to being a hero in a group of heroes."</p>
<p>Now that you are a hero, you have no worries. Right? </p>
<p>AKA "Clint Barton thinks," which is not always a good thing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Contingency

**Author's Note:**

> Movie-verse. Contains movie spoilers. A little 616 thrown in, but if you blink you'll miss it.
> 
> Not written for any particularly challenge (although you can write me and tell me what lj challenges and groups there are). My first fic in about five years and I am rusty, rusty, rusty.

The four cylinders spun through his fingers as he rolled them over and under his knuckles, metallic colors flashing when the light caught them.  
  
These cylinders were not his gig. _Really_ not his gig. They represented what guys in eyepatches or suits or American flag costumes got paid the big bucks to decide.  
  
He kept spinning them as he looked across the Manhattan rooftops toward Stark Tower. Or Avengers Tower. Whatever it was called now. The top section had been repaired but the damaged, slightly crooked, "A" remained.  
  
Not only was this not his gig, it was pretty much the last gig on earth he'd want, barring, say, a job in Public Relations. But he kept the cylinders spinning.  
  
Natasha had already gone back to SHIELD. She'd lasted exactly two weeks out here in the wild, which was about a week longer than he thought she'd last. Since they were both still part of SHIELD, he knew she'd call when she wanted backup. She preferred those deep solo spy missions, but she always called him for the messy, noisy takedowns.  
  
She might have been able to tell him what to do about the cylinders, but she also would be likely to tell Fury and he .... didn't want that.  
  
And that was the fucking problem, wasn't it? What _did_ he want to do about this? He didn't want the responsibility, that was for damned sure.  
  
Years earlier, when Coulson had picked him up during a run gone bad and given him the choice between SHIELD and jail, it'd been a pretty easy decision. Compared to Barney and his thugs, SHIELD was practically all white hats, saving the world.   
  
Hadn't taken much field work to see how stupidly fucking naive that idea had been. By the time SHIELD sent him in on a field assignment, it was clear that someone needed stopping. The players were usually all some flavor of bad. But it wasn't always that straightforward - like the time they'd sent him to kill an enemy agent and he couldn't do it. He'd given her the choice to come into SHIELD or die and she'd come and stayed and been his partner on more missions than he could remember.  
  
Natasha's missions were deep in the political, but that was never something he worried about. When Natasha called he went, and he made damned sure he had her back. So that was something, anyway. Clear cut, no ambiguity. Protect Natasha, finish the mission. In that order. That the ledger was red or black didn't bother him when Natasha was involved.  
  
Then this whole Avengers thing. Stop Loki. Save the world from aliens. Aliens. Big damned aliens that took large parts of Manhattan off the map. Not very hard to see which side he wanted to take on that one.   
  
The half of the press that wasn't screaming for them to be hung for their part in destroying New York called them heroes. For a covert ops agent, the word "hero" was a new thing and a damned fine one. He could get used to being a hero in a group of heroes.  
  
Except, right before he'd left the Tower for parts unknown, Banner had taken him aside and handed him the cylinders. And now what the hell was he supposed to do?  
  
“Just in case,” Banner had said quietly.  
  
The cylinders were all roughly the same size, although the heft was a little different on each. Each cylinder had a machined thread for a quick connect onto an arrow shaft, just like all his other arrowheads. Automatically he cataloged the differences between the cylinders as he juggled them between his fingers, mentally adjusting his aim and the flight parameters for each one.   
  
Silver – heavy, the weight balance toward the middle but slightly out of center, with a point clearly meant to penetrate to deliver payload. Red and yellow – light, compact, true, slightly bulbous at the nose and probably meant to crush on impact. Striped red and white - slender, well-balanced, a point like a needle. Green – the heaviest and largest of the bunch, with the weight toward the front with a penetrating tip that looked like it would expand into something close to a harpoon.  
  
There weren't any other marks or labels on the cylinders, but he knew what - or who – they were for: Thor, Iron Man, Captain America and The Hulk himself. He should have asked Banner if they were lethal, but he knew the answer to that anyway. Of course they were, otherwise what would be the point?  
  
Banner had given him the means to kill each one of his super-powered teammates, including Banner himself.   
  
_“Just in case.”_  
  
He'd had enough missions go bad that he'd been left in the field before - once you got past standard missions and into black ops the whole "we don't leave one of our own behind" thing got ditched pretty fast. He accepted that his life could be forfeit any time he went out, just some pawn wiped off the board, that he could die in service of some abstract mission that he understood the _what_ of and didn't really give a flying fuck about the _why_.  
  
The thing with Loki on the Helicarrier, though.... that was pawn on a whole new level. His intention had been to free Loki, and if it meant killing Natasha, Fury and every single person he'd ever known in SHIELD, well then, that was what Loki wanted him to do. There'd been no give in that, it was an imperative, more important than breathing.  
  
Natasha could have killed him from a distance, put him down the way compromised agent protocol said she should have, but instead she chose hand-to-hand. They were equally matched, her greater skill against his greater upper body strength and she knew that. She sure as hell hadn't been pulling her punches. He'd been off, though, and she'd known, just _known_ , sticking to combat when she could easily have put a knife through his ribs and ended it and him.  
  
He'd seen the security recording and he could see the moment in the fight, in the first two moves, when she decided not to kill him. But she could have, and if she'd thought that she couldn't stop him, she would have.  
  
And he found that comforting. She wouldn't have let him keep going like a rabid dog, which is what he'd been.  
  
He'd already killed SHIELD agents, would have succeeded in bringing down the Helicarrier if not for Stark, and he would have gone on to kill more agents to set Loki free. Mind control or not, it was hard to live with what he'd done, and he couldn't even begin to think about his part in Coulson's death.   
  
Natasha had made the call not to put him down but she would not have let him keep killing.  
  
The cylinders were the same thing. The trust he placed in Natasha was the trust that Banner gave him. The non-superpower guy on the team, the observer who watched from the edges, the closest thing to an average guy.   
  
Could he even do it? Bring himself to take, say, Captain _Fucking_ America, symbol of Boy Scouts and Do-Gooders world-wide, down? Obedience to authority had never really been his strongest feature, but it had been almost a... _a joy_ to work with Cap and the rest of the team.  
  
He remembered the way he'd felt fighting Natasha - absolutely empty. He remembered the way he'd felt on the Helicarrier after everything had been over - the sheer carnage, the dead bodies, the way people looked at him as though he was a bigger monster than the ones that had nearly destroyed New York. And that was something Banner understood.  
  
He unbuckled the quiver, shrugged out of it and loaded the cylinders into the deepest reserve, coding their sequence into the autoload program.   
  
Yeah. He could do it.


End file.
